Perhaps you know that story where people stepout of this world and into anotherthrough a split in the air – they feel for it

as you would your way across a stage curtainafter your one act, plucking at the pleats, trying for the folded-in opening through which

you shiver and shoulder yourselfwithout so much as a glance upto the gods, so keen are you to get back

to where you were before your entrance:those dim familiar wings, you invisible,bumping into things you half-remember

blinded as you’d been out therein the onslaught of lights, yes, blindedbut wholly attended to in your blindness.

Imagine our dying being like that,a kind of humble, eager, sorrowless returnto a place we’d long, and not till now, known.

No tears then. Just one of us to holdaside the curtain – here we are, there you go –before letting it slump majestically back

to that oddly satisfying inch above the boardsin which we glimpse a shadowy shuffling dark.And when the lights come on and we turn to each other

who’s to say they won’t already bein their dressing room, peeling off the layers,wiping away that face we have loved,

unbecoming themselves to step outinto the pull and stream of the night crowds.

And here you are

among us againtelling us – with that accuracy,and hilariously – what it was like,wide-eyed, exhilarated to have been thereand now back here in a room again;you here in a room againwith us all standing around grinning,filling to the brimto have you among us againraising our glassesto your unbelievable absence

All those turning

Blow you wild in the wilderness you all who the ever you areyou once of the world – whirl round it now – whip more and moreinto the blear and blaze of your ever-ending circle

Blow you spirit-wind you soul-gale you who so searingly outnumber ushowl and haul in all those turning now to dust – to this hot windthis planet’s bright belt of charged streaming dead

Blow you blinding storm you wind of nothingto the naked eye – turn up the high white hum of the invisiblering made up of all manner of things lost to us

Blow you gone you still and never-to-be-bornyou dead for a century dead for a day all you outliving us out there in the catastrophic air of this black and never dawn

See how you blow you bone spark you ash-turned airinto this room where I stand with these small shaking wavesin this glass of water I hold in my shaking hand